Clarity on PLM

What I learned this week … came from watching the Did You Know 3.0 Video and asking myself what it means to the world of manufacturing and product lifecycle management (PLM). The answer? Quite a lot. If you haven’t seen the video, it is worth 5 minutes of your time to give you an entertaining and informative look into the times we live in. The part that really caught me was that we live in “exponential times.” Things are changing rapidly in our personal and professional lives, and manufacturers need to consider the ways the world is changing in order to be relevant with the right products (and the right processes) to capitalize on the future.

Note: Thanks to Randall Newton at CADCAMNet for posting the link. I have seen this before, but his post was what made me really think about it.

Did You Know?

The video, if you haven’t seen it before, tries to put the world in perspective through facts and pictograms. I have seen these before, and they are always thought-provoking.  According to the source, this was put together by Karl Fisch and modified by Scott McLeod. Some of the key takeaways for me are:

• MySpace has 200 million subscribers, if it were a country it would be 5th largest in the world
• A week’s worth of the New York Times holds as much information as an average person would come across in a lifetime in the 18th century
• The amount of technical information doubles every two years
• The number of text messages sent/received in a day exceeds the population of the planet
• The time it took for a product/technology to reach a market audience of 50 million:
  • Radio – 38 years
  • Television – 13 years
  • iPod – 3 years
  • FaceBook – 2 years

Further, there are some fascinating facts about the increased capabilities of computing technologies.

What Does it All Mean (for Manufacturing and PLM)?

The video ends with a question – “What Does it All Mean?” – without providing an answer. The answer, of course, depends on who you are and how the changes impact your world.  When I watched this, I tried to take the perspective of what impacts this will have on product innovation, product development, engineering, and manufacturing. Further, I tried to consider how this will impact the software solutions that help support product lifecycle management. There are challenges and opportunities on the way. Here are my thoughts:

• Social networking is exploding – this offers a tremendous benefit for manufacturers that want to use social computing in PLM to improve collaboration and dramatically change the way they interact with their markets and customers.
• Knowledge is exploding – manufacturers have a tremendous challenge to manage their own information and intellectual property, let alone be able to access and leverage the information available across the globe. Search, Knowledge Management (KM), and Business Intelligence (BI) will become bigger requirements inside PLM and to drive product innovation by tapping into global knowledge sources. Social computing will also play a role here, as manufacturers try to discover the people with the right knowledge in addition to knowledge.
• Time to market is evaporating – the time lag between a technical advance and the commercialization is disappearing. This makes new product development (NPD) critical, but also further supports the need to rapidly discover and take advantage of knowledge anywhere in the world. It also means that manufacturers will have to get their products right the first time, or someone else will take the market away from them.
• Computing power is exploding – the exponential growth of computing power will play a large role in what PLM vendors are able to do with their software, opening up new opportunities including continued expansion of 3D, animation, and simulation in the way we interact with products.

So that is some insight on the times we live in and my thoughts on the implications for manufacturing and PLM, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t. And I am sure I missed something, feel free to add. And for those that watched the video, please pass along any ideas on how to get that music out of my head!

Please feel free to review related perspectives, free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

I had the chance to talk with … Drew Sherlock of ShapeSpace a while back, and then had the opportunity to meet him in person at COFES. We talked about the importance of search in in engineering and product development, and how searching by shape is adding another way for companies to find (and hopefully easily reuse) parts. Search has received a lot of attention over the years – particularly as companies are trying to consolidate search across multiple data sources using enterprise search. In design and engineering, search has evolved to include parametric search (search based on attributes, typically on metadata that describes a part) to complement more basic text search techniques. But can a company have too many ways to search? Given the potential benefits of reuse – and the tendency for most people to reinvent the wheel when they can’t readily find a good starting point – I will say “not yet.” Maybe if we find the killer search technique it will change everything, but for now having another way to find relevant parts is a big step forward.

What do they Offer?
What ShapeSpace offers is the promise of a new way to find parts. Finding parts quickly improves efficiency, helps companies reduce duplicate parts (by finding and eliminating existing duplicates), and helps companies reuse existing parts instead of creating new ones (reducing the number of new duplicate, or near-duplicate parts being created). Of these, reuse is one benefit that can be broken down into many valuable improvements:

• Reusing a part saves the time to engineer a new one, speeding time to market
• Reuse eliminates the effort required to design the new part, saving cost
• Reducing duplicates (old and new) helps reduce purchase costs and inventory carrying costs
• Reuse of a part also means reuse of the analysis, validation, testing, and compliance effort for that part

The way they do this is by reviewing CAD files (currently working with Solid Edge) and creating an index of shapes with their product, PartBrowser. Then, people can search (currently on the desktop) via text, sketch, or sample parts. The most intriguing part to me is the way they display the results. The software uses a 3D context to show search results (see graphic) with different panes, or sheets, of 3D thumbnails of parts. These sheets are transparent and grouped logically, and the user can rotate and move them to get a better fit to what they are looking for. This allows them to browse based on visual clues, narrowing in on the shape they are looking for. In this way it is more of a browsing approach, showing everything similar to a shape selected, and bringing the closest matches up in front, plus other suggestions with similarities. A very compelling idea, and a very interesting concept for the interface. For a more in depth look at the 3D context (with the navigation tree and related text) see this sample PartBrowser screenshot.

3D Browsing of Shape Search Results

Who do they Work With?
They are in beta, working with some early customers. One customer in food industry, using it for the designs in their plant and processing facilities, another in the furniture industry using it for dies. The potential industries include any company that uses 3D part designs, which doesn’t limit them very much. The potential for this to be a very generalized tool in the PLM toolkit is significant.

How does this Fit into the Ecosystem?
ShapeSpace is not the first company to offer shape-based search, and certainly not the largest. This is an area that is ripe for innovation, however, and specialty vendors like ShapeSpace are more likely to push the limits than their larger competitors. ShapeSpace is in very early stages of their solution, but will also be very interesting to keep an eye on as their product and company matures.

So that’s what I hear from them, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?